Hello Jeff

Jeff wrote:
I am writing a book that has many chapters. It is a complex book, so I'm
writing a little in one chapter and a little in another at various times,
adding ideas as they come along. At present each chapter is in a separate
file, but that has created a great many separate files and I am looking for
a way to coordinate them. I therefore thought of the Master document as a
tool to do this. I used to use the Master document when I was writing in
WordPerfect 5.1 and it worked very well for me. But I heard that master
documents have problems and a great risk of corruption in Word. Is that
true? What kind of problems occur with Master documents. Can they be
avoided?

To add to what others have said already: A big question for me is
whether the individual files you have right now are based on the same
template, and whether the formatting used is consistent over these
files. These things need sorting out if not only done so; and before
that, even _thinking_ about a Master Document might corrupt your work! :-)


Any suggestions as to how to maintain a "big picture" of all the chapters in
this manuscript? I could of course put them all in one huge file with the
heading chapters creating a master list in the TOC - and I'm considering
doing that - but the idea of putting all the eggs in one basket that might
get corrupted somehow bothers me. Am I wrong to worry about that?

You could easily test the big file scenario: Bring all the chapters into
one file via INCLUDETEXT fields. Save the file with active fields, then
(in a copy), unlink all the fields. You have one big file now. Fiddle
around with it a bit, how many pages are there? How big (filesize)?


This manuscript has a lot of illustrations (if that makes a difference in
the responses) and I use frames to position them within the document.

Like Daiya, I don't see much problem with frames per se. The question
I'd raise here is what you use them for: Are you running body text
around your frames/illustrations? What kind of illustrations are we
talking about, btw, and how were they inserted into Word (presuming they
were not made in Word itself)?

Greetinx
Robert
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